Friday, March 30, 2012

Defeatist Mentality Leads to Defeat: Why No One Should be Surprised When the Iran-Hamas Axis Destroys Israel

For quite some time, Israel has been run by people who think that they are a lot smarter than they really are; the old stereotype portrayed Jews as being smarter than non-Jews but the people running Israel are doing their very best to completely refute any such notion: in fact, they are willing to die to permanently end this stereotype (or, to be more precise, to condemn Israel's citizens to death--I am quite sure that when the nuclear fire hits Israel the leaders will literally go underground and make their escape). A regular, "dumb" person would react to repeatedly being slapped in the face in his own home by making sure that the slapper never hit him again (actually, a regular "dumb" person would not even have to be slapped repeatedly to offer such a natural response...once would be more than enough)--but instead of thoroughly defeating their bloodthirsty enemies, Israel's "brilliant" leaders develop such innovative strategies as building concrete school desks for little children to hide behind and inventing expensive Iron Dome anti-missile missiles that will bankrupt Israel long before they convince Arab terrorists to stop taking free potshots at Jewish children. This "brilliant" Israeli strategy was preceded by voluntarily surrendering to Israel's enemies the very land from which those enemies are now launching the missiles that those enemies pledged to launch as soon as they received the land; the openly stated goal of Israel's enemies is--as Yasser Arafat repeatedly declared before and after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize--to "liberate Palestine with jihad with blood and with fire," which means that any territory conceded by Israel simply becomes the staging ground for the next attack against Israel. If you want to know why no one should be surprised when Iran and/or its proxy terrorist group Hamas destroys Israel just read Sarah Honig's sad tale of Israel's giddiness in the face of yet another humiliating defeat. Here is a taste of Honig's brilliant diagnosis of what she correctly labels Israel's "cerebral convolutions":

In the Gazan view our aim should have been to entirely disable them from striking again. Since we didn’t accomplish this, they won and we lost. To underscore their contentions they made sure to fire the last salvo--after the ceasefire for which they ironically begged. Thus they had the apparent last word, imparting the impression that they were capable of pummeling us more, if only they wanted to.

It almost doesn’t matter that we reject this interpretation of reality. If they consider themselves undefeated, then for all intents and purposes they indeed weren’t defeated.

Likewise, it’s hardly relevant that we never launched a wide-ranging campaign to crush all Gazan capacity for belligerence. In Gazan eyes if we could crush them, we would have. The very fact that we didn’t set out to do so attests to weakness on our part and to a deterrent strength on theirs.

However, Gazans too misread the situation. It’s not that we’re too weak to take them on, but that we’re scared of winning. This is something that they plainly can’t get their heads around. Nobody in the Mideast can comprehend cerebral convolutions like ours.

When Great Britain faced an existential threat from the predations of Adolf Hitler's Nazi armies, Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

The Rabin-Peres-Netanyahu-Barak-Sharon-Olmert plan--surrender land to bloodthirsty enemies, set child killers free so that they can kill more innocent, defenseless children, force children to cower behind concrete desks as deadly rockets pummel schoolyards and become giddy when an anti-missile missile that costs $100,000 shoots down one of a nearly endless supply of cheap rockets--falls just a bit short of Churchill's standards.

About Me

"A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial, strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them."--Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Nobel Lecture)

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"In chess what counts is what you know, not whom you know. It's the way life is supposed to be, democratic and just."--Grandmaster Larry Evans

"It's not nuclear physics. You always remember that. But if you write about sports long enough, you're constantly coming back to the point that something buoys people; something makes you feel better for having been there. Something of value is at work there...Something is hallowed here. I think that something is excellence."--Tom Callahan